So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (35 page)

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I had at least one disagreement with Friendly. The substance of this disagreement, and the emotion it clearly generated—thanks, apparently, to our shared assumption then that communications technologies of the time were fixed and forever—were as follows.

Fred urged that television network and station executives deserved the same protection afforded print journalism—the same freedom of the press. But at the same time, stations enjoyed a government-licensed monopoly to operate one of the only presses in town. Thanks to nature itself, only a limited number of licenses could be granted in any given community. This “scarcity,” in my view, made constitutionally necessary government regulations and controls over content. There are no restrictions—theoretical or actual—on the number of newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, leaflets, or books that may enter any city (called, by broadcasters in an unguarded bit of nomenclature, “markets”); there are limits on the number of available channels. In other words, a television license is a precious thing; usually one of two or three (at most, seven), depending on the size of the market, and it seems clear that even spectacularly incompetent management cannot avoid turning a large profit. So Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have devised a licensing system, under which a license will be awarded—renewable every three years for each station—to that person (real or corporate) who can demonstrate the station will be operated in “the public interest, convenience and necessity.” In fact, with few exceptions, that “person” turns out to be the very network or local corporation which already had the license, but at least the possibility of revocation keeps the licensee thinking about the public interest, at least on Sunday mornings. That “public interest” requirement found expression in a number of ways—all of them, it seemed to me, healthy ones. The “Fairness Doctrine,” for example, required that all sides of a controversial question be treated reasonably fairly, not necessarily within each program but over the life of the license. The requirement for “equal time” mandated that if a political candidate is given or sold time for a message, his opponents be provided the same amount of time on the same basis. A licensee was also held to certain standards of decency and other restrictions; for example, after 1965, when the U.S. Surgeon General officially confirmed links between tobacco and major illnesses, Congress banned broadcast ads for cigarettes. Friendly argued those limits had a “chilling effect,” inhibiting a robust discussion of ideas on television. I argued that without government regulation—and public watchdogs monitoring the airwaves—there would hardly be any news programs at all and very little of public affairs. Events over the past forty years, and the limited amount of serious news and public affairs on most cable systems, and Internet channels for that matter, show, I now maintain, I was right.

A friend once asked, “Going back to the Friendly-Mankiewicz rule. You still think there’s at least one major factual error every time? Even in long-form journalism? Even in NPR radio reports?”

I know why the friend asked that question. I have loved radio since I was a kid and had a major role in the founding of NPR’s
Morning Edition
in the late 1970s. Something’s wrong in every story? It’s just human nature and the process of news gathering and trying to learn what happened and telling other people about it. But it’s not the most important “rule” that describes biases and distortions in news coverage. Here’s what bothers me most. It’s something within our control; the Friendly-Mankiewicz rule describes a fact of life that holds sway no matter how much hard work journalists invest in getting a story right. But what worries me is false equivalency, belief every story has two sides and that if you report these two sides you are doing a good job as a journalist. I think this comes from television, perhaps rooted somehow in the old “Fairness Doctrine”—that every report of just about everything means airing the so-called opposing view. But every issue, every story, every news narrative, does
not
have two sides. Some have only one side, like slavery. Some have twenty.

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People forget now that the NPR we know today was not inevitable. There is no inevitability in having a strong national news voice on radio. It did not happen by chance. I went for some interviews with NPR’s search committee (consisting entirely of local station managers and the chairman of the board), and almost the first question I was asked was what my priority would be if I became the CEO of NPR. My answer was I would do whatever was needed so that “people like me would have heard of it.” It was an honest answer; I had never listened to
All Things Considered,
nor was I up on the facts. Just what was public radio? Where did its revenues come from? How many stations formed the network? And when I served there, some of the issues that had to be addressed seem curious now in retrospect. When we introduced something exciting and new—for example, a live broadcast from Australia via satellite—we had to add the fake sound of static because our listeners refused to believe anything could come live from as far away as that without static.

We also faced the belief that women’s voices are too shrill and, hence, unbelievable for news programming. This was a prevailing view on radio, which had made news programming an entirely male occupation. There was one exception: Pauline Frederick, long a correspondent at the UN for one of the networks. I had always admired her work, reporting from the UN without any sermonizing and in a calm expository voice. (And I hired her for NPR as soon as the opportunity was available.) I doubted those who told us we shouldn’t use a woman’s voice for a major assignment. This seemed doubly odd to me, because Susan Stamberg—the host of
All Things Considered
—was certainly our most-admired—indeed, cherished—correspondent. And correspondent Linda Wertheimer had done great work, covering, for example, House hearings on the impeachment of Richard Nixon. So when the opportunity arose for NPR to broadcast the Senate debate on the Panama Canal Treaty (made possible, actually, by the Senate leader Robert Byrd’s belief that NPR was a private in-house network “owned” by the Senate), I turned to Wertheimer.

This was to be a historic moment. Since John Adams as vice president had first called the Senate to order, its audience had consisted entirely of those people seated in the Senate gallery at the time. Now, after nearly two centuries, Vice President Walter Mondale would begin a Senate debate before an audience of millions, and despite the grumblings of some male correspondents and their advocates the first voice Americans would hear from the Senate chamber would be that of Linda Wertheimer of NPR. Linda presided over that NPR microphone for every word of the Senate debate, serving her network—and her country—brilliantly, and we never heard again about the “shrillness” of women’s voices. I think it not excessive to say that for at least the next ten years Linda, Cokie Roberts’s political coverage, and Nina Totenberg’s judiciary reporting served as the backbone of NPR.

At NPR, I once again encountered a fact that has proved to be true throughout my career: Whenever good things happen in Washington, D.C., meaningful, bipartisan cooperation can always be found, if not easily, at least right below the surface.

An anomaly among virtually all federal government agencies, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) had a rare distinction: It received, in full, its annual budget the first day of the fiscal year, instead of asking for, and receiving, it monthly. The result of this munificence was that, having deposited the entire budget when received, CPB would have built up a good bit of interest money by the end of the fiscal year, a sum over which public TV and public radio would battle, in a struggle that seemed to me more and more fictitious each year, because TV would get, each year, the lion’s share of this “extra money”—usually several million dollars—in Aesop’s original meaning of his expression “lion’s share,” namely, all of it. Even when public radio was recognized, our share was usually less than 5 percent of the allocation.

So it came as a welcome surprise one morning to receive a call from the chairman of CPB, Henry Loomis. Henry was an affable, intelligent fellow—an unlikely Nixon appointee—and basically a radio guy who had served earlier as the head of Voice of America. “Frank,” he said, “I have about fifteen million dollars in the interest account for the year, and I’m thinking of giving it all to radio. What would you do with it if I did?” Surprised, I thought for a moment—but only a moment—and then answered, “We’d start a morning news program.” When Henry asked me what we’d do “in the second year,” I had a ready answer: “Blackmail, Henry. I’d go to your board and ask, ‘Do you want to be the guys to snatch away this rapidly-becoming-popular news program, probably the only source of news in most listeners’ communities?’” He chuckled and agreed we could have the money.

My vice president for programming, a radio veteran named Sam Holt, had been selling—I was easy—me for some time on the importance of the five buttons on car radios that represented local stations and the need to provide all-day programming so that the local NPR station could earn one of the five. We thought news would be our vehicle to a larger audience and that once listeners realized that a serious news program was available during what the broadcasting trade called “morning drive,” on the same station that delivered
All Things Considered
at five to seven
P.M.
in what was called “afternoon drive,” they would set their station button to the NPR affiliate wherever they were. Sam was a serious student of listener habits, he once told me, because his first job, in high school, was to go to parking lots and set one button on as many car radios as he could to the kilocycle of his employer’s station.

So I, NPR’s news director, and the news department started to put a staff together and, more important, to select two hosts for what was to be a two-hour program, which we called
Morning Edition,
with only a few minutes available for “cut-ins” by our local affiliates (er, members). After an extensive search and auditions, the news director had come up with two skilled (so we thought) broadcasters, a man and a woman, each with good, substantial experience. I thought we should give them a tryout, so we scheduled, with less than a month before we were slated to go on the air, a two-week run-through of
Morning Edition
with our new hosts, but limited in audience to the staffs of our member stations. After the two weeks, we polled the stations; with very few exceptions, they liked the program, but they
hated
the hosts. Hated (there was no better word).

The news director was resolute—“Fire them and find somebody else.” So we did just that, and with less than two weeks to go to find substitutes, I came up with an idea: Ask Bob Edwards, the co-host of
All Things Considered,
to take on the job for just one month while we came up with new hosts.

We got lucky: Bob agreed to do it. He liked it, the audience loved him, and to my surprise he stayed with the morning program for twenty-five years and became, clearly, one of the most respected voices in broadcasting, guiding the program to its present status of, with 25 million listeners a week, a contender (with Rush Limbaugh) for the top-rated news program in all of radio, commercial and public.

I knew we had a success on our hands when I boarded a cab in Chicago the third day
Morning Edition
was on the air and discovered the driver had it on his radio. “That’s the NPR morning news show,” he told me. “I listen to it all the time.”

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In 1981, the overwhelming election of Ronald Reagan as president and a Republican House and Senate led to a determined campaign to dismantle Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and, if possible, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Programs for the poor, such as welfare, food stamps, housing assistance, and medical care, came under heavy budget attacks and cuts, as well as determined efforts to reduce funding for old-age assistance and environmental protection. Clearly, civil rights protection would come to a halt, if it were not reversed. Under the circumstances, public broadcasting was also ticketed for sharply lower appropriations. The federal agency charged with promoting public television and radio, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was then headed by Sharon Rockefeller, socially as well as politically prominent—she was the daughter of Senator Charles Percy of Illinois and the wife of Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia—and a vigorous proponent of public television and indifferent to the needs—indeed, to the existence—of public radio.

Every year, Ms. Rockefeller and I, as the president of National Public Radio, would engage in a battle before the CPB board, at a public meeting, I to urge that a larger share of the CPB appropriation be allocated to NPR and she to spend any extra funds on public television (PBS), a battle she nearly always won, largely because the board members, appointed by the president, were almost all public television viewers and hardly aware of public radio—one reason being PBS’s publicity apparatus was well funded and NPR’s, on our slender budget, nearly nonexistent. That year, Ms. Rockefeller sought my cooperation in creating a joint, well-financed (from our budgets) lobbying entity, which would promote the appearances before the congressional appropriations committees by Ms. Rockefeller, the PBS president, and me, to urge an increase in the funding for public broadcasting. I refused, on the grounds that when programs like food stamps and Head Start were being cut, I didn’t think it fair, or even wise, to seek more money for public broadcasting. My stance was doubly frustrating to her, because NPR had just succeeded in getting into law (thanks mainly to the efforts of then-Representative Tim Wirth) a provision that of all appropriations going to public broadcasting, 25 percent must go to public radio. This was a great triumph for NPR, because our previous share had always been much lower .

Any animosities between Ms. Rockefeller and me were heightened when the board voted to devote all the accumulated funds one year to PBS, because, as Ms. Rockefeller explained to me at a public meeting, “we want to expand
MacNeil/Lehrer
[a public affairs program I thought then to be less than lively, if not actually boring] from a half hour to a full hour,” and I had replied, also publicly, reluctantly withholding my high regard for Jim Lehrer, “I thought it already was an hour.”